Editor’s Note: As discussed below with regard to current Administation policy and the quotes from former OIRA Administrator Dudley, cost-benefit analysis plays an essential role in protecting public saftey.

From: Bloomberg

More than a decade has passed since the last major-airline accident on U.S. soil. That’s great news for aviation companies and their passengers — and a complication for rule makers trying to improve flight safety.

The benefits of aviation rules are calculated primarily on how many deaths they may prevent, so the safest decade in modern airline history is making it harder to justify the cost of new requirements.

From Driving the Day (You are reading it daily, aren’t you?) there’s a story about how the federal government’s overseer of regulators, the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA), has been shrinking staff while regulators’ staff have been growing:

The number of people working in federal agencies with regulatory authority has doubled to about 292,000 under both Republican and Democratic administrations during the past 30 years. In the same period, the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, the White House bureau that reviews most major rules, has shrunk to 45 employees from 90, according to data compiled by researchers at George Washington University and Washington University in St. Louis.

Editor’s Note: The DATA Act’s exemptions from the Administrative Procedure Act and Paperwork Reduction Act raise grave concerns and questions about the proposed legislation which require thorough review and vetting. It is not clear how a statute which would deprive the public of the protection of the “good government” laws could possibly be in the public interest. For OMB’s views on the proposal, please see OIRA Watch here.

The federal spending transparency bill came under fire earlier this week when an administration official said the act adds additional regulatory complexity while removing some of the necessary Office of Management and Budget oversight.

At a June 13 panel discussion hosted by the Partnership for Public Service, OMB controller Danny Werfel said the Digital Accountability and Transparency Act is inconsistent with some the lessons learned from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act

Federal regulations in the United States encompass all aspects citizen’s lives. However, finding regulations has never been very easy for members of the public or regulated businesses because relevant materials can be spread across numerous sections of the United States Code (USC) and Code of Federal Regulations (CFR).

The new electronic edition of the CFR – the LII CFR – allows users to search the CFR by keyword. The LII’s search system operates much like any search engine encountered on the web and thus should be usable for anyone familiar with these engines. Further, semantics technology allows for some flexibility in searching for terms, (e.g., “taxes” via “tax”) to allow for a wider breadth of search.

The search results not only include the relevant sections of the CFR, but also provide corresponding likes to the USC, relevant entries in the Federal Register, and even pending rulemaking dockets.

The version of the CFR searchable at the Cornell site is updated as regularly as the online governmental systems, which can be months faster than the official printed copies available from the GPO.

Attached is a letter from CRE to the Bureau of Land Management discussing the agency’s compliance with BLM, DOI and OMB open government/transparency guidelines.

I am writing to bring to your attention a violation of the Open Government and Transparency Initiative championed by the White House and implemented by the agencies through guidance from the Office of Management and Budget (OMB). Specifically, the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) is refusing to release to the public the public’s own comments on the agency’s draft Programmatic Environmental Impact Statement (PEIS) for Oil Shale. BLM requested public comments on the draft document in a Federal Register notice on February 6, 2012.

Editor’s Note: The Center for Regulatory Effectiveness filed a Request for Correction petition with the FCC under the Data Quality Act in 2007 explaining that the Commission could not use a highly publicized localism study attributed to a former agency employee because it did not comply with OMB and FCC data quality standards. CRE’s petition may be found here. The FCC notification that they would respond to the petition in the rulemaking is found here. A trade press article discussing the CRE petition may be found here and a law review article discussing CRE’s petition may be found here. In their February 2008 Report and Order (Footnote 467), the FCC stated that they would not use the studies that CRE had explained could not be used.